see the post about SOX above.. this is ALREADY LAW for any publicly traded company. And yes there is a huge boom in server storage! Forget the White House, imagine GM or IBM having to keep all the mails their employees send or receive... yes, it's being done, it should be trivial for something as small as the White House.
no, most people don't try to cheat their employers at the last minute... you might need to come back to this company later, and why would you get yourself in potential legal trouble just to get at your boss? Perhaps on the last day your boss should look over your box of stuff you take and of course cut your access and accounts at lunchtime... then go out for one last long lunch with the crew and leave early. you can still look over what you're taking out and still cut the access it's about being professional and friendly about it.
...ANYONE that resigns, even though they give a two week notice, is asked to leave at the end of the business day...
do you PAY people that give appropriate notice for the 2 weeks? Because if your company doesn't that's dishonorable and highly unprofessional. I understand that it's important to tie up loose ends quickly and avoid the opportunity for people to get at you, but if you have employees that have worked for you 5, 10 years and are ready to move on with your life, that is horribly unprofessional and unfit appreciation for the time and service you've provided. It's the kind of thing that makes longstanding employees plot to screw you just out of spite if they know they'll get the "perp walk" even if they're never late and always get good reviews.
After all, the publishers make boat-loads of money getting schools to buy "new" math and reading every few years when elementary education hasn't changed much in a hundred years for those subjects. It also provides a way to put the correct "philosophy" in to the book as it becomes politically appropriate... believe me, the deciding factor for most book purchases is the politics a book with ideas to "radical" or not "politically correct" will get axed no matter how good it's educational value.
Book Companies will fight tooth-and-nail and politics will be the tool. The best english literature is now on many schools banned lists because it discusses slavery or race or extreme poverty. Most of it happens to be out of copyright and free... good luck getting your local school to teach what books they forced us to read even 20 years ago.
That's why robots fail... they should manage complexity so YOU can do important things like tend to little people.
The big push for robots in Japan is the aging community. As every body able-bodied needs to work, that leaves older people at home. It reduces medical expenses and improves quality of life to keep older people at home as much as possible. For an older person, fetching food, watching for emergencies, and dispensing medication/watching stats can save a worker having to do this daily, and that reduces health costs by not letting the person fall behind because they're too tired to feed themselves or take medicine (you'd be surprised how big a hit that is to insurance).
why should there be a difference... shouldn't ALL phones be smart? It's a better allocation of resources. That is why Apple made an iPhone and sold 2 million @ $499/$599 a pop in just 4 months. There's a market for phones that "just work" and all the MS phones I've seen are a far cry from "user friendly" as iPhone.
Microsoft has had 5 years to do something and their product isn't "must have". Note they did do the same hard work as Apple on Xbox and Zune to some success, they are user-friendly products. It's not necessarily bad engineers, it's bad management. Content with making a "good enough" product, then locking companies into business deals to make it successful. They beat out Palm for features but pushed the idea that smartphones are "hard" to do right.
but they LEFT when their businesses became illegal and moved to places where it was legal. They may have had issues "importing" the gambling but if the business was in a country where it was legal, the US govt had no leg to stand on. Unless they enforce US law outside the US. Then you'd have to ask why they don't allow the UAW to press it's union contracts into Mexico or Canada, or why they allow companies to use sub-paid workers overseas. Business laws and moral laws follow a severe double standard in congress. How is Yahoo any different than Nike abusing sneaker making children?
If that's the case why can't we make companies pay up for lost union wages, illegal overtime worked, or child labor that's against the law in this country... but they do it every day and make billions. Even in Iraq where we ousted their govt, we enforce the double standard of keeping the "evil dictator's" laws on the books that are convenient for us, like labor rules and property rights because they suit our corporate needs.
the information the Chinese authorities wanted was every bit as legal as a PATRIOT act request. Companies don't engage in official civil disobedience very often if ever.
but Yahoo the business was compelled to follow Chinese law or they'd start locking up Yahoo's employees for not complying. I personally think Yahoo should have stonewalled, or at least forced the issue of jurisdiction for data on US servers not in China.
Ultimately, the request from China was legal for a business in China, and Yahoo has employees that can be arrested out of spite.. the Chinese do that you know. The request was probably more "legal" than the patriot act shit the US congress has been allowing like crazy... like the case of govt agents using spy powers in contract negotiations!!
wireless under linux is shaky at best. it's technically ILLEGAL to make open source drivers according to the FCC due to radio interference rules, so if the hardware maker doesn't support Linux you're screwed. Try making your wireless work on windows without a driver disk, it's not like Microsoft tries to support it, they expect somebody else to.
Apple just makes systems that properly wake up from hibernation/sleep quickly. My Macbook is the first machine that simply just works.. close the lid when you're done, stash the machine.. open the lid and unpause the still open itunes in under 15 seconds! I'd say Apple has already done one better.. implementing a bios CORRECTLY in the first place!
actually many non-darlings of Wall Street have that in their statements, my company has something similar. Companies in non-growth industries can't afford lawsuits, and large legal fees from people suing them left and right. It's much better to follow the letter and the SPIRIT of the law than to fight things. The big companies at the top are really quite unethical compared to medium-sized companies. The only reason mega-corps get away with what they do is everybody at the ethical companies has their nicely rewarded savings wrapped up in their stock. Until people stop putting stock in criminal enterprises like Microsoft, the situation will get worse.
Re:Diminishing sales equals diminishing use?
on
The Dying PC Market
·
· Score: 1
Japan has never had the PC culture of the US in the first place. PCs caught on late, have always been overly expensive and their market is not PC oriented like the US is, so they'll be first to show the post-PC signs.
I had only 1GHz machines until 1 year ago exclusively and since I've gotten new machines, the only thing that the old ones can't run are games. Then you buy a NEW notebook with dual cores that can't run games as well as a 3 year old PC with a decent video card... That lack of fully equipt PCs being sold is a huge part of the problem... if the PC can "only" do work, then nobody will care when it dies. In that respect Microsoft is directly responsible for ignoring the PC segment building XBox and killing PC gaming... now the general public simply doesn't care about PCs except for the internet. Ooops!
M$ has even claimed it's patent encumbered... that was the leverage with the Novell deal, they just didn't say it like that. Also, even though the LANGUAGE C# may not have patents, all of the interesting stuff you can do to interface with windows or do graphics, etc. is all stuff that has to be reverse engineered... i.e. it probably has patents tied to windows OS that Microsoft will pull out if anybody gets too big.
I'm a big fan of competition anyway. It's good to have to fight for things.. that's competition. The patent issue makes the idea of fighting better than trying to agree with them and being stabbed in the back. I wish more of the OSS devs would get that through their heads... don't try to agree with them... duke it out!
why not have the drones phone home address be wrong 5 of 10 times? It's clever (maybe too clever for bad guys) and points people to blame honest servers instead of the actual ones, and waste time and resources.
Both silverlight and C# are PATENT encumbered! Even though stupid people are trying to implement them in OSS, they will never be free. Also, only the core is free, the actual useful bits are standard proprietary.
That said, upgrading Javascript would be a good thing. OSS breaks compatibility all the time to push old code into compliance. The old version would stick around just like it is, but there's a lot of dangerous stuff that needs removed or fixed. Better to fix the problems even if it means breakage, than to simply move the cheese to a new name and keep everybody following the same bad habits.
Frankly, the standards compliant companies need to get together with W3C and pull the "big one". HTML5 (XHTML5) CSS3, ES4... added to Firefox 3 and Safari/KHTML in the next 12-18 months the web could be completely reinvented. It's time to "sandbox" the old web to archive and split web pages from web applications that have developed. Anything older than HTML5/CSS3/ES4 should go by the wayside, the web needs a big push forward... it's better that OSS gets there first no matter how much better Microsoft's ideas may be, if OSS and open standards aren't FIRST, then they'll always be second best.
so if you want to deliver a Doom 3/Unreal 3 engine game then you need to simplify the parts more. I personally find that the original games are just tech demos.. and the original companies quickly go back to engine building, not game advancement. Perhaps they need to look at where they're spending money at.
The current trend is to spend the majority of the money on massive volumes of unique content for every level. Trying to fill 50 levels in one shot is a little unrealilstic. Perhaps they need to shorten AAA games into something more like serial novels. They have to be willing to barter their upfront investment in physics/animation/graphics engines on keeping people hooked on content. Myth is that most people sit and play a whole Doom 3 or Quake 4 beginning to end... those people have too much time and money... they aren't the public. The public buys Wii because the games are fun and short, you can play them... an have a LIFE NOT playing games... games in their place and all that.
I don't think the current model of $60 then $35 "expansions" would work either, it feels like a rip-off. If each part (including the first, gotta take a risk guys) was $15 people would buy more games. To get the point down they'd have to bundle something as that's too little profit to sell in a box at retail. Perhaps selling collections or subscriptions, say hint/theme book with just a quick CD-ROM. Or sell monthly packs with 10 games that give you a serial key with 5 games.. and you can go online if you want the other 5 for more money.
The key focus is parting people from their money. People don't part with $60+ easily. They don't typically promise $15/month as subscriptions either (we don't always play, it's not worth it) on the other hand, the $10 - $15 is just about right for "disposable" income to a game for a few weekends. Throw in easy ways to play online or mod the game with friends and you'd have something. But you can't expect people to buy all the chapters either, each has to stand on it's own or new people won't join in the middle. Serial novels have been doing it for years.. that would be the model to figure out.
funny that the head of Mandriva "doesn't have all the information". Think about that.. this is an official blog and even the higher-ups at Mandriva don't have all the details as to why their contracted customer is changing the deal after they started paying!!! What else is left to do, they bid fairly, delivered then got told, sorry, but we're not using your software. That gives them the money, but steals the successful implementation, they can't use this customer as an example of good service and good software because M$ stopped the customer from using Mandriva's services at the last minute.
this sounds like it's directly to address what guys like lemmelson did. They would create an over broad, but unrealized application, then manipulate the patent later to include what they see other people doing that's only tangent to the original patent. That defeats the purpose of publishing the patent for other people to build from if those future inventions that might be "clean" can be "stolen" when they change the published patent after the fact.
but if your house is exactly like somebody else's you've never seen the govt can't TAKE it away from you... IF you used somebody's patent in your new house YOU bought and paid for, then that's EXACTLY what happens... with software that happens a LOT.
so the solution is to release content. Magic has had the CCG component tamed for years. There are very few high priced (in-print) cards anymore as everybody knows the market is flooded. The way to make this work is to cater to collectors by releasing variations, and to the current crop of avid players releasing often. Magic has an online game but it's 100% online and you can't mix cards between real and virtual. All the cards for online exist on their servers. Of course if it was a money maker Sony wouldn't be trying to have real cards play online... That's what people really want, not two separate sets. So you're left with release often, or use some online test of skill to unlock high level cards in the game... i.e. you can buy it or copy it, but can't play it until you attain so many battles online.. that's how Wow works even with gold farmers as you can't just buy high level stuff, your character still has to play to the required level or skills.
The key with CCG is do you want depth of skilled players or a short run of buyers with deep pockets that buy in as a fad then move on? you could alway add some cards as coded for online "payment" but make them not trade-able (like lands in Magic that you still need many of for real-space play)
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see the post about SOX above.. this is ALREADY LAW for any publicly traded company. And yes there is a huge boom in server storage! Forget the White House, imagine GM or IBM having to keep all the mails their employees send or receive... yes, it's being done, it should be trivial for something as small as the White House.
That's because it's BIGGER than most cats!!! The wonders of genetic engineering.
no, most people don't try to cheat their employers at the last minute... you might need to come back to this company later, and why would you get yourself in potential legal trouble just to get at your boss? Perhaps on the last day your boss should look over your box of stuff you take and of course cut your access and accounts at lunchtime... then go out for one last long lunch with the crew and leave early. you can still look over what you're taking out and still cut the access it's about being professional and friendly about it.
...ANYONE that resigns, even though they give a two week notice, is asked to leave at the end of the business day...
do you PAY people that give appropriate notice for the 2 weeks? Because if your company doesn't that's dishonorable and highly unprofessional. I understand that it's important to tie up loose ends quickly and avoid the opportunity for people to get at you, but if you have employees that have worked for you 5, 10 years and are ready to move on with your life, that is horribly unprofessional and unfit appreciation for the time and service you've provided. It's the kind of thing that makes longstanding employees plot to screw you just out of spite if they know they'll get the "perp walk" even if they're never late and always get good reviews.
absolutely.
After all, the publishers make boat-loads of money getting schools to buy "new" math and reading every few years when elementary education hasn't changed much in a hundred years for those subjects. It also provides a way to put the correct "philosophy" in to the book as it becomes politically appropriate... believe me, the deciding factor for most book purchases is the politics a book with ideas to "radical" or not "politically correct" will get axed no matter how good it's educational value.
Book Companies will fight tooth-and-nail and politics will be the tool. The best english literature is now on many schools banned lists because it discusses slavery or race or extreme poverty. Most of it happens to be out of copyright and free... good luck getting your local school to teach what books they forced us to read even 20 years ago.
actually, wheel chair ramps are part of the secret plot... that way robots can get us anywhere!
That's why robots fail... they should manage complexity so YOU can do important things like tend to little people.
The big push for robots in Japan is the aging community. As every body able-bodied needs to work, that leaves older people at home. It reduces medical expenses and improves quality of life to keep older people at home as much as possible. For an older person, fetching food, watching for emergencies, and dispensing medication/watching stats can save a worker having to do this daily, and that reduces health costs by not letting the person fall behind because they're too tired to feed themselves or take medicine (you'd be surprised how big a hit that is to insurance).
why should there be a difference... shouldn't ALL phones be smart? It's a better allocation of resources. That is why Apple made an iPhone and sold 2 million @ $499/$599 a pop in just 4 months. There's a market for phones that "just work" and all the MS phones I've seen are a far cry from "user friendly" as iPhone.
Microsoft has had 5 years to do something and their product isn't "must have". Note they did do the same hard work as Apple on Xbox and Zune to some success, they are user-friendly products. It's not necessarily bad engineers, it's bad management. Content with making a "good enough" product, then locking companies into business deals to make it successful. They beat out Palm for features but pushed the idea that smartphones are "hard" to do right.
but they LEFT when their businesses became illegal and moved to places where it was legal. They may have had issues "importing" the gambling but if the business was in a country where it was legal, the US govt had no leg to stand on. Unless they enforce US law outside the US. Then you'd have to ask why they don't allow the UAW to press it's union contracts into Mexico or Canada, or why they allow companies to use sub-paid workers overseas. Business laws and moral laws follow a severe double standard in congress. How is Yahoo any different than Nike abusing sneaker making children?
If that's the case why can't we make companies pay up for lost union wages, illegal overtime worked, or child labor that's against the law in this country... but they do it every day and make billions. Even in Iraq where we ousted their govt, we enforce the double standard of keeping the "evil dictator's" laws on the books that are convenient for us, like labor rules and property rights because they suit our corporate needs.
the information the Chinese authorities wanted was every bit as legal as a PATRIOT act request. Companies don't engage in official civil disobedience very often if ever.
but Yahoo the business was compelled to follow Chinese law or they'd start locking up Yahoo's employees for not complying. I personally think Yahoo should have stonewalled, or at least forced the issue of jurisdiction for data on US servers not in China.
Ultimately, the request from China was legal for a business in China, and Yahoo has employees that can be arrested out of spite.. the Chinese do that you know. The request was probably more "legal" than the patriot act shit the US congress has been allowing like crazy... like the case of govt agents using spy powers in contract negotiations!!
wireless under linux is shaky at best. it's technically ILLEGAL to make open source drivers according to the FCC due to radio interference rules, so if the hardware maker doesn't support Linux you're screwed. Try making your wireless work on windows without a driver disk, it's not like Microsoft tries to support it, they expect somebody else to.
Apple just makes systems that properly wake up from hibernation/sleep quickly. My Macbook is the first machine that simply just works.. close the lid when you're done, stash the machine.. open the lid and unpause the still open itunes in under 15 seconds! I'd say Apple has already done one better.. implementing a bios CORRECTLY in the first place!
actually many non-darlings of Wall Street have that in their statements, my company has something similar. Companies in non-growth industries can't afford lawsuits, and large legal fees from people suing them left and right. It's much better to follow the letter and the SPIRIT of the law than to fight things. The big companies at the top are really quite unethical compared to medium-sized companies. The only reason mega-corps get away with what they do is everybody at the ethical companies has their nicely rewarded savings wrapped up in their stock. Until people stop putting stock in criminal enterprises like Microsoft, the situation will get worse.
Japan has never had the PC culture of the US in the first place. PCs caught on late, have always been overly expensive and their market is not PC oriented like the US is, so they'll be first to show the post-PC signs.
I had only 1GHz machines until 1 year ago exclusively and since I've gotten new machines, the only thing that the old ones can't run are games. Then you buy a NEW notebook with dual cores that can't run games as well as a 3 year old PC with a decent video card... That lack of fully equipt PCs being sold is a huge part of the problem... if the PC can "only" do work, then nobody will care when it dies. In that respect Microsoft is directly responsible for ignoring the PC segment building XBox and killing PC gaming... now the general public simply doesn't care about PCs except for the internet. Ooops!
M$ has even claimed it's patent encumbered... that was the leverage with the Novell deal, they just didn't say it like that. Also, even though the LANGUAGE C# may not have patents, all of the interesting stuff you can do to interface with windows or do graphics, etc. is all stuff that has to be reverse engineered... i.e. it probably has patents tied to windows OS that Microsoft will pull out if anybody gets too big.
I'm a big fan of competition anyway. It's good to have to fight for things.. that's competition. The patent issue makes the idea of fighting better than trying to agree with them and being stabbed in the back. I wish more of the OSS devs would get that through their heads... don't try to agree with them... duke it out!
That would seem to be the point of steam, to deliver content more quickly in smaller bites. Surprised they haven't done this sooner.
why not have the drones phone home address be wrong 5 of 10 times? It's clever (maybe too clever for bad guys) and points people to blame honest servers instead of the actual ones, and waste time and resources.
Both silverlight and C# are PATENT encumbered! Even though stupid people are trying to implement them in OSS, they will never be free. Also, only the core is free, the actual useful bits are standard proprietary.
That said, upgrading Javascript would be a good thing. OSS breaks compatibility all the time to push old code into compliance. The old version would stick around just like it is, but there's a lot of dangerous stuff that needs removed or fixed. Better to fix the problems even if it means breakage, than to simply move the cheese to a new name and keep everybody following the same bad habits.
Frankly, the standards compliant companies need to get together with W3C and pull the "big one". HTML5 (XHTML5) CSS3, ES4... added to Firefox 3 and Safari/KHTML in the next 12-18 months the web could be completely reinvented. It's time to "sandbox" the old web to archive and split web pages from web applications that have developed. Anything older than HTML5/CSS3/ES4 should go by the wayside, the web needs a big push forward... it's better that OSS gets there first no matter how much better Microsoft's ideas may be, if OSS and open standards aren't FIRST, then they'll always be second best.
so if you want to deliver a Doom 3/Unreal 3 engine game then you need to simplify the parts more. I personally find that the original games are just tech demos.. and the original companies quickly go back to engine building, not game advancement. Perhaps they need to look at where they're spending money at.
... an have a LIFE NOT playing games... games in their place and all that.
The current trend is to spend the majority of the money on massive volumes of unique content for every level. Trying to fill 50 levels in one shot is a little unrealilstic. Perhaps they need to shorten AAA games into something more like serial novels. They have to be willing to barter their upfront investment in physics/animation/graphics engines on keeping people hooked on content. Myth is that most people sit and play a whole Doom 3 or Quake 4 beginning to end... those people have too much time and money... they aren't the public. The public buys Wii because the games are fun and short, you can play them
I don't think the current model of $60 then $35 "expansions" would work either, it feels like a rip-off. If each part (including the first, gotta take a risk guys) was $15 people would buy more games. To get the point down they'd have to bundle something as that's too little profit to sell in a box at retail. Perhaps selling collections or subscriptions, say hint/theme book with just a quick CD-ROM. Or sell monthly packs with 10 games that give you a serial key with 5 games.. and you can go online if you want the other 5 for more money.
The key focus is parting people from their money. People don't part with $60+ easily. They don't typically promise $15/month as subscriptions either (we don't always play, it's not worth it) on the other hand, the $10 - $15 is just about right for "disposable" income to a game for a few weekends. Throw in easy ways to play online or mod the game with friends and you'd have something. But you can't expect people to buy all the chapters either, each has to stand on it's own or new people won't join in the middle. Serial novels have been doing it for years.. that would be the model to figure out.
funny that the head of Mandriva "doesn't have all the information". Think about that .. this is an official blog and even the higher-ups at Mandriva don't have all the details as to why their contracted customer is changing the deal after they started paying!!! What else is left to do, they bid fairly, delivered then got told, sorry, but we're not using your software. That gives them the money, but steals the successful implementation, they can't use this customer as an example of good service and good software because M$ stopped the customer from using Mandriva's services at the last minute.
this sounds like it's directly to address what guys like lemmelson did. They would create an over broad, but unrealized application, then manipulate the patent later to include what they see other people doing that's only tangent to the original patent. That defeats the purpose of publishing the patent for other people to build from if those future inventions that might be "clean" can be "stolen" when they change the published patent after the fact.
but if your house is exactly like somebody else's you've never seen the govt can't TAKE it away from you... IF you used somebody's patent in your new house YOU bought and paid for, then that's EXACTLY what happens... with software that happens a LOT.
so the solution is to release content. Magic has had the CCG component tamed for years. There are very few high priced (in-print) cards anymore as everybody knows the market is flooded. The way to make this work is to cater to collectors by releasing variations, and to the current crop of avid players releasing often. Magic has an online game but it's 100% online and you can't mix cards between real and virtual. All the cards for online exist on their servers. Of course if it was a money maker Sony wouldn't be trying to have real cards play online... That's what people really want, not two separate sets. So you're left with release often, or use some online test of skill to unlock high level cards in the game... i.e. you can buy it or copy it, but can't play it until you attain so many battles online.. that's how Wow works even with gold farmers as you can't just buy high level stuff, your character still has to play to the required level or skills.
The key with CCG is do you want depth of skilled players or a short run of buyers with deep pockets that buy in as a fad then move on? you could alway add some cards as coded for online "payment" but make them not trade-able (like lands in Magic that you still need many of for real-space play)